The Quest to Write Faster – Part I

I’ve embarked on journey to write faster. Now, to a lot of writers, that is akin to a curse. Anathema. “How dare you butcher the writing craft with such a goal!!” Well, I’m doing this for a couple of reasons.

The number one reason is that I simply want to write more words per day to put out my material faster. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to write more material. The key word in that sentence is write. That is where a lot of writers get it twisted. Writing is just that: writing. It’s not editing at the same time. It’s writing. That means that we have to simply let the words flow from us and write. We can’t be concerned about typos and all the rest of that. We have to write. It all goes back to what I always say and it’s an adage in the writing world: writers write.

Now don’t get me wrong. We need to write material that people are going to want to buy and enjoy. That makes all the sense in the world. But when it comes to the craft of writing and how you get to that finished product, the reader doesn’t care how I got there or for that matter any writer. They care about the story. They care about the characters. If that is compelling then how fast you wrote it doesn’t matter one iota.

Which comes to the second reason why I want to write fast. So that I can put out more material for the people who enjoy my work. I want them not to have to wait for another nine months before I come out with the second part of my series. I hate that. I’m willing to wait for the second part of a series for a month or two. Three at the most. But once it gets longer than that then it’s almost out of sight, out of mind. Yes, your mailing list is supposed to keep people up to date on what you’re doing with the series which is all well and good but after a while you start getting tired about hearing about it and just want to see it. Action, not talk. Writing fast will allow me to be an active writer.

Active, fast writing will allow me to write far ahead and put books out on a schedule that most writers just can’t produce. They think more in terms of getting the story perfect and there’s something to be said about that. You want to write fast but you want to write good as well. You don’t want to come out with garbage. Can you do both? I think you can but you have to train yourself to do it like that. That’s where I am at the moment. I’m in training and I’ve already reached my goal and beyond.

I have to thank Chris Fox and his book 5000 Words Per Hour. That book is very practical and it forces you to look at your writing in a different light. I recommend it just so you can get that word count up. There’s also another book that he recommends by Rachel Aaron called 2k to 10k. I have not read that one but it has over 700 reviews and still has a 4.5 star rating so it must have something in it that’s usable. Either book is going to help you finish what you start which is the main thing for many people who have been working on a novel for years.

I must confess. I’m not looking to write 5000 words an hour. That’s just insane. But 5,000 words a day? Well that’s within my reach. That’s well within anyone’s reach actually. If you do half of that in an hour then you’d be banging out an average length novel about once a month which is just crazy. But you can do it.

I have about 30 books in me at the moment. I think the exact number is 31. That’s not including what I know God will put in me later on. And I simply cannot write my non-fiction material as fast because of the precision and research that goes into it. So I’m in this for the long haul because you just have no idea when He’ll say, “Time’s up.”

My goal is to have six releases by the end of the year 2017. I want to double that in a whole year’s time. That goal is something that can definitely be achieved.

I have more reasons for this but I will wait until the next post to get that to you.